A Taste for China

English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism

Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins

Description

Challenging existing narratives of the relationship between China and Europe, this study establishes how modern English identity evolved through strategies of identifying with rather than against China. Through an examination of England's obsession with Chinese objects throughout the long eighteenth century, A Taste for China argues that chinoiserie in literature and material culture played a central role in shaping emergent conceptions of taste and subjectivity.

Informed by sources as diverse as the writings of John Locke, Alexander Pope, and Mary Wortley Montagu, Zuroski Jenkins begins with a consideration of how literature transported cosmopolitan commercial practices into a model of individual and collective identity. She then extends her argument to the vibrant world of Restoration comedy-most notably the controversial The Country Wife by William Wycherley-where Chinese objects are systematically associated with questionable tastes and behaviors. Subsequent chapters draw on Defoe, Pope, and Swift to explore how adventure fiction and satirical poetry use chinoiserie to construct, question, and reimagine the dynamic relationship between people and things. The second half of the eighteenth century sees a marked shift as English subjects anxiously seek to separate themselves from Chinese objects. A reading of texts including Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Jonas Hanway's Essay on Tea shows that the enthrallment with chinoiserie does not disappear, but is rewritten as an aristocratic perversion in midcentury literature that prefigures modern sexuality. Ultimately, at the century's end, it is nearly disavowed altogether, which is evinced in works like Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.

A persuasively argued and richly textured monograph on eighteenth-century English culture, A Taste for China will interest scholars of cultural history, thing theory, and East-West relations.

Author Information

A Taste for China

English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism

Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins

Reviews and Awards

"A Taste for China insists that we continue to query the parameters of eighteenth-century Britishness, and in its impressive range of readings, succeeds in making China a pedagogical imperative for the teaching of eighteenthcentury fiction." --Eighteenth-Century Fiction

"A Taste for China offers nuanced and provocative readings both of individual literary texts and of eighteenth-century cultural history. Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins makes a convincing case that critics and historians of the eighteenth century need to pay far more attention than they have to the shift from cosmopolitanism to orientalism. Scholars in literature, history, and fine art will benefit from reading this book." --Robert Markley, Trowbridge Professor, University of Illinois

"A number of recent books have taken up a related set of questions, but Zuroski Jenkins demonstrates that they have far from exhausted the interest of what she makes clear is an unexpectedly rich and polyvalent set of cultural dynamics. A Taste for China is poised to make a decisive and significant contribution to the field." --David Porter, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan